MEDIAdeluge

Note to Microsoft: Buy Twitter... quickly

Microsoft may be looking for other investment opportunities post Yahoo! Take a look at Twitter. Sure, it’s not $45 billion. This is more of a get-in-early play.

Twitter = your pithy take on what’s news to you shared with the people following you — in 140 characters or less.

The tech early adopters have all fled Facebook and are now residing on Twitter. It is beginning to grow rapidly — expanding beyond the ubergeeks — and could well be the next big thing. Its dead simple and the most powerful networking tool i’ve come across lately. Best of all, there are no vampires biting you, no superpoking, no spam.

Have a close look, Microsoft. Could make spaces.live.com relevant in a hurry.

New Media Influence (part 1)

Much has been written and said about the influence of new media and the rise of “citizen journalism.” The old media model is being flipped on it’s head. It’s clearly a time of rapid change in mass communications. Legitimate questions are being asked about what will become of the old stalwart industries like journalism, advertising, marketing, PR and others caught up in the changing tides of media.

The big local, regional and national newspapers are seeing circulation shrink and revenues disappear as classifieds and other advertising go online. Also going online are the readers that used to read the morning paper. The problem for the traditional or “mainstream media” is that the people who used to read the newspaper are not reading the online version. Instead, they are discovering new ways to consume, share and comment on the news of the day.

Editor and Publisher reports: “According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950. Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.”

Some news organizations are beginning to embrace blogging and other new media technology as a way to stem the flow of their readership away from traditional media and toward online sources. Today, TechCrunch. Com and the Washington Post announced that TechCrunch stories will appear on WasingtonPost.com. Michael Arrington wrote of the partnership on TechCrunch today, “adding new types of content to the site to retain reader interest, over and above their existing stories. And this is certainly a great partnership for us, allowing us to get our content in front of a larger, more mainstream audience.”

Other newspapers still mistakenly see the printed publication as their primary offering and newspaper affiliated blogs as a place to post about topics that don’t make the paper. A more realistic stance for editors is to break news — and follow it as it develops — on their blogs and then build out the story more fully and with reader perspectives in the print edition. If more traditional media companies don’t come to this realization soon – and then better monetize their online eyeballs — they can expect to continue to get scooped on stories and can further expect the people who used to subscribe to the paper to instead go elsewhere.

Newspapers aren’t the only ones struggling with a changing news model. PR is struggling to figure out how to remain relevant as the landscape changes. For example, do the firms whose bread and butter was the press release have any place in the new media environment? Does PR take on trying to influence new media? What about other forms of digital media? Where is the line between what an ad firm might do and what PR takes on?

In PR for example, there was a model of influence that was very linear and consistent. Making planning media for national announcements pretty straightforward. (See the chart below.)

But, with the rise of new media and our ever-expanding connectedness, that model no longer works. Instead something like the following is probably closer to reality.
This has significantly changed up the way PR must think about news and storytelling. Good PR people and entrepreneurs alike should already know who the influential bloggers are in their space and should be treating those bloggers like traditional media — pitching stories, respecting deadlines and tracking influence.

While I’ll virtually always advise against writing a press release and more specifically advise against relying on a press release to drive coverage – unless you have a fiduciary responsibility to do so – there is still a place for PR and neither journalism nor public relations will go away. The medium or media a journalist uses to tell a story will continue to evolve and companies / organizations will continue to want to communicate their stories. How this is being done now and how it will be done in the future will be very different from how it was done in the past.

Contribute to Myanmar Relief

Social Median has a good list of ways you can contribute to Myanmar relief on the Social Median blog here.

The Myanmar government put its tally of deaths since Cyclone Nargis struck early Saturday at 22,500 and said 41,000 people were missing. Such early estimates often prove inaccurate, and the wide path of this cyclone, which destroyed homes across the fertile Irrawaddy Delta and into Yangon, the nation’s main city, left a large area of destruction, complicating rescue efforts and damage assessments for days or weeks to come. read more from the NYT here.

New Media Recruiting

You’re a startup. Funds are limited. How do you hire the best and the brightest? Think like Connected Ventures — the company behind Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker. They filmed themselves at work. check out the results.

To Date, they’ve received 932 comments — many of which are by people wanting to work there. Watching the video, how could you not want to work with that group of people.

They had a great idea, took some time late in the day, filmed themselves and put it online. The song is fun and catchy, but the broader point here is to think creatively about how you communicate. There are so many ways to let your creative juices flow — with positive results for your company.

How to Get TechCrunched (part 1)

Scoring coverage in TechCrunch is seen by many an Internet venture as the key to making it big. In this post-bubble-1.0 world where the norm is smaller startups and less about securing massive funding or going IPO to generate big dollars for huge media buys, highly influential media are more important than ever to new ventures to help expose the venture to a large audience. To be clear, bloggers like Michael Arrington and his ilk are highly influential media. They should be treated as if they are Walt Mossberg, John Markoff or Ed Baig when pitching them.

That said, as influential as Arrington, Scoble, Cashmore, Malik and others are, they can’t possibly cover every company they come across and every company they come across isn’t a good fit for them. Here are ten tips to getting TechCrunched.

1. Read the blog you intend to pitch. Know what gets covered in TechCrunch and why. Chances are, if VCs are interested in you, TechCrunch will be too, but having a clear insight into what and how media write is invaluable when pitching them and will help whether you know the right VCs or not.
2. Get an introduction. If you know anyone who knows someone at TechCrunch, this is your best in. TechCrunch gets piles of pitches every day. Because startups can be hard to vet, a referral will help open doors for you.
3. Don’t write a press release, tell a (short) story. Crumple up that press release, you don’t need it. Instead, write a note to your mom about what you do. Make it dead simple. No offense mom. While moms are willing to listen all day long to how we are “disrupting,” “revolutionizing,” or “changing the world,” TechCrunch doesn’t have the time. The note to your mom will help you distil your pitch to its essence. You only have a few sentences to catch TechCrunch’s attention.
4. Know your value proposition and be able to express it in five words or less. This should be the lead of your pitch email. DO NOT say your product is unlike anything on the market today. Of course it’s not. That goes without saying. As a side benefit, you now have your elevator/party pitch. “Hi, I’m Christian. I work for a startup in Seattle. Think Facebook meets Monster.com.”
5. Give a frame of reference. The best way to do that is to say something like, “we’re the eBay for tickets” or “we’re MySpace for videogames.” It’s counterintuitive to use other companies to help define yours so think of it as defining your space – especially if you are trying to create a new space.
6. Know your space. Again, it is understood that you are different from your competition; you should still be able to list one or two competitors whose lunch you are going after. Tip: don’t list every possible competitor, stick to the top one or two. Those are who you are going after and who you should be focused on. Leave the other emerging players off the list.
7. Don’t reference other coverage. That will make TechCrunch less likely to cover you, not more likely. The best place to try to leverage coverage is with TV. For example, if you get good coverage in the Wall Street Journal, you should immediately to go the cable TV channels and pitch them (I’ll go into depth in another post).
8. Be specific, concise and to the point. The remainder of the pitch doesn’t need to be overly polished. Too many adjectives can actually hurt you. If you reference stats to show a trend for example, make sure to include the stats. Including the stats saves time for the writer.
9. Who’s on the team. Who is working with you? Do they have past startup success to point to? Are they executives from well-known tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.?
10. Make sure the timing is right. Do you have a news hook like you’re launching? You’re announcing funding? Make sure there is a news angle if at all possible. This creates a sense of urgency to cover you as well as makes the coverage more interesting for the reader.

Guy Kawasaki interviewed Michael Arrington, founder and editor of TechCrunch in November of 2006. It’s a bit long but worth checking out, here.

Michael is a good guy and exceedingly smart. Give him the high level into to your offering and he’ll ask all the right questions. If and when you pitch TechCrunch, be prepared for the eyeballs that follow.